Video Games

Review – Droplitz (PC)

Jun 17th, 2011

Blitz Game Studios | June 25, 2009

Droplitz is a game about controlling the flow of drops through a series of pipes to a set of collectors. It’s pretty straightforward in it’s presentation and design. After aligning a series of pipes and letting them fill for a few seconds the sections used are eliminated and more spill in from the top. Let things go for too long and it’s game over. There are varying degrees of difficulty, mostly controlled by how many distributors and collectors are available.

There is a bit more strategy required if you want to maximize your score than just connecting tubes. Once a tube is connected it becomes permanently locked. You may discover that had you turned it one more shift 90 degrees you could have connected two collectors for even more points.

It’s pretty well paced and not an overly stressful title to play. Definitely one for the casual gamer who just wants to get some quick entertainment in short bursts. It’s not excessively flashy but it’s reasonably fun to play.

Unfortunately, puzzle games have a bit of a hard niche to fill. On one hand, there are a lot of pretty clever ideas out there for puzzle games. They range from extremely complex in every way games like Portal, which is a Puzzle game at it’s core. Or they can be simple and repetitive like Tetris. Often they are something somewhat in between like say, Rush. Droplitz falls more on the Tetris end of the spectrum, which is arguably the more difficult end. Why is that exactly?

There is a lot of free competition in the Tetris end of the Puzzle spectrum. Which hurts Droplitz more than anything else really. It’s a decent little time waster style game, but there are so many options in this space that won’t cost a thing or are cheaper, it may be hard to justify a title like this. On the plus side, there are a lot of sales on Steam involving small time puzzle games so it may be worth picking up for a discount.

Droplitz can be found on Steam http://store.steampowered.com/app/23120/here.

Review – Plants vs Zombies (PC, Mobile)

May 23rd, 2011

by Ramen Junkie.

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PopCap Games, Inc | Released: May 5th 2009

Occasionally Valve likes to promote other games by having tie ins with Team Fortress 2. Generally these will be special limited edition Hats or Weapons. I generally steer clear of the idea of buying a game “just for the hats”. Especially considering how these are often somewhat expensive games. Plants vs zombies went on sale for something like $4 plus you got TWO TF2 hats for free. For the first time I admittedly bought a game just for the special Hats for TF2. I’ve bought other games that had hat based promos but I bought them because the game seemed interesting (Mount & Blade, Left 4 Dead 2).

The irony here and the point of this little story is that of all of the games I’ve gotten hats from, this one is the one I’ve ended up playing the most. It did look interesting before I’d played it but I’m not a huge fan of the Zombie Genre. The basic premise here is to defend your home against the oncoming horde of Zombies. Instead of using the traditional methods of fire, shotguns or old records and cricket bats, you instead use an army of plants. As the game progresses you get an increasingly more powerful array of plants to help defend yourself, which is good because you must face an increasingly powerful array of Zombie attackers.

This task is not without it’s hindrances. a third of the way through the game the action shifts tot he backyard where you must contend with the pool, which only takes a certain types of plants or require lily pads to hold up regular plants. Later you move to the roof where the pitch becomes a problem for your straight shooting Pea Shooters requiring the use of catapults. Then there is the problem of the night. The currency of the game is sunlight, which happens naturally during the day and can be produced from Sunflowers. You can use Mushrooms at night but they are considerably weaker than their daytime counterparts. There’s a LOT more to this game though, which only helps drive up the value and quality. The main Adventure game consists of 50 stages, though to help break up the monotony, there are several special stages that don’t involve straight planting and defending. The most common will give you a conveyor belt sort of menu of pre chosen plants to drop. These stages don’t require Sunlight but you’re limited to what is given to you to complete the stage. Other bonus stages involve breaking open jars or destroying grave stones hoping to reveal plants instead of more Zombies.

You also get to collect coins as you go along in order to pay for upgrades from the Crazy neighbor. You know he’s crazy because why else would he price his stuff so cheap? Oh right, and because he SAYS SO. Some of these upgrades are almost necessary such as the last line of defense pool cleaners. There’s also a “Zen Garden” you can buy plants and supplies for, it’s essentially a virtual garden of friendly plants to take care of which will earn some additional money for the player. Top if off with a bunch of themed mini games and an interesting replay mode for the standard Adventure mode where you are forced to use a particular set of plants and you’ve got a lot of good replay value built in once the main game is complete.

You certainly get a lot of decent and fun gameplay for not much. Plants vs Zombies can be found on Steam http://store.steampowered.com/app/3590/?snr=1_4_4__13Here. There is a demo available as well.

Review – Frequency (PS2)

by Ramen Junkie.

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Frequency
PS2 – 1-2 Players
Gameplay – 7/10

Graphics – 7/10

Sound – 9/10

Replay – 6/10

Overall – 7.3/10

Frequency is generally a hard game to describe. There isn’t really anything that is much like it. The closest thing I can think of is “DDR without the down arrow”, but, there is so much more on in
addition to that so the description doesn’t really fit very well. For one, the tracks are a lot longer. Then there’s a little ship thing that you’ll actually have to control your on top of following the
pattern…

Well, maybe I should start out simple and then get ease you into the more complicated parts of the description. Imagine that you have a line, and that line represents a song. Now, turn that line into an 8-sided extruded tunnel. Your ship travels down this tunnel. There are no branches or forks but the tunnel does twist around a lot to some nice trippy visual effects. Essentially it is still the straight line. Now
take that tunnel and divide it up into several shorter segments. Each song is divided into segments; each segment is roughly 8 measures long.

Ok, now, back up one step to the 8 sided corridor. Each side of the corridor is lined with patterns of nodes that follow the sound of certain parts of the music. Each side represents a different layer of
the sound. For example, pretty much every track has a basic starting side representing the lowest drum or bass line. Pretty much every song has a vocal track. The techno based tracks may have a couple more bass sides or some synth sides. The more rock like tracks have more guitar sides, the hip hop type tracks tend to have several vocal sides.

The trick here is that the music for that side doesn’t play continually until you unlock that side. When the track starts out you’ll have a basic drum line. As you unlock the guitars and vocals, they will join in. It’s really cool to hear the songs sort of unfold as you complete more sides. It’s sort of like getting a custom made remix each time you play through the track.

To complete a side you have to follow patterns of nodes. You must complete two consecutive measures of nodes on a side to unlock it. Then the side will play on its own for the rest of that segment. See each segment has its own set of sides. Though some of the sides repeat throughout the song in more than one segment, it’s probably not possible to collect all 6 sides of a segment in one pass.

But wait; I said there are 8 sides in our tunnel yet only 6 sides to capture. You see, after you’ve unlocked 5 of the 6 sides you’ll unlock freestyle sides of that segment which can be used to collect bonus points. There are two type of freestyle sides, Axe and Scratch. Some tracks have two of one type but most have one of each. The scratch creates a record scratching effect as you move the analogue stick as well as placing different sound samples into the music as you press the buttons. The Axe track adds digital
sort of “crystal” sound effects to the music as you move the analogue stick and hold one of the buttons.

As mentioned before, you also collect nodes along each measure This is the part that is comparable to DDR. You move along and hit the nodes as they pass under your target, the nodes have left right and middle and work similar to DDR’s left, right, and up arrows and correspond to the Square, Circle, and Triangle buttons respectively. The X button is used to activate power-ups you collect. There are two power-ups. Auto-Capture will complete a side for you, and multiplier will increase your score. You can also use the L and R buttons to capture nodes but honestly this could have been better designed to alow you to turn between the sides of the tunnel. Instead, you move between the sides using the left and right control pad buttons. Also, unlike DDR, you are penalized for hitting an incorrect or non-existent node and must start over on your 2 measures in a row sequence.

Sound thoroughly confusing enough? It’s not really as bad as it sounds if you’re at all familiar with Rhythm style gameplay, especially DDR.

The object of the game is to make it through all of the segments to the end of the song. The number of segments varies with the length and complexity of the song. Harder difficulty songs tend to be longer. As you travel along the song your life bar is depleted as you miss picking up nodes. It is increased when you complete a side. You pick up power-ups by completing a measure with power-up nodes. In addition to the main game, there is also a freestyle mode where you create a song of your own using samples from the in game music. You can even play the homemade tracks in the regular game mode. This mode is sadly fairly limited in what it really lets you do. You aren’t really so much making music as telling the game when you want the pre made music to play.

The game comes with 25 songs, some by popular known artists such as No Doubt or Fear Factory, others by less well-known artists such as Funkstar De Luxe or Symbion Project. Pretty much all of the music is good though. In Easy mode, only the first 15 songs are available, in Normal there are 20 songs and Expert lets you play all 25 songs. The songs are divided into 5 song stages and you must complete the first 4 songs of an earlier stage to unlock the next higher stage. Each stage has 4 songs initially playable and a 5th song that is unlocked by getting a combined high score of a certain amount on that
stage. To complete a difficulty you complete all of the songs on that difficulty.

This is fairly frustrating for anyone who is unable to complete the harder difficulty levels. It also means a fairly limited song selection for those same people. Twenty songs isn’t much when you consider DDR tends towards 70-80 or so tracks. All that keeps a rhythm game going is variety of music and needlessly limiting what music choices this was isn’t a good idea if you want to keep the player interested. The remix mode isn’t a very fun addition to help keep up interest either.

The difficulty doesn’t help either.

The game starts out fairly simple but becomes excessively difficult in the later stages of the game. The highest difficulty is certainly more difficult to complete than the highest difficulty on say, DDR. I can pass most Heavy DDR songs with a controller, I can’t pass a single one in Frequency. The overall difficulty is compounded because of the extra interaction required by changing sides. Also the tunnel moves around at weird curves and whatnot which can be slightly disorienting, Additionally the node patterns tend to become extremely complex and the game is pretty unforgiving in regards to mistakes. This can lead to a lot of frustration and a pretty unsatisfactory game experience.

All in all, Frequency is a pretty fun game as far as rhythm games go. There is also a sequel called Amplitude that is supposed to be even better but in my opinion it drops a lot of what makes this game
interesting in favor of making things a bit easier. Unfortunately maybe easier is what this game needs. Though the visuals are interesting, the music is good and the game play is unique without being lame, it’s a bit repetitious and limited in what can really be done. The steep difficulty later in the game hurts as well.

Review – Star Sky (PC)

May 9th, 2011

by Ramen Junkie.

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Review – PC – Star Sky

Mårten Jonsson | Released 05.09.2011

There was a recent news article floating around about “Video Games now Considered Art”. Now, personally, there are some questionable artistic content in say, Call of Duty, but even Movies can be considered Art and still have their craptastic turns like Revenge of the Fallen.

Then there are games that really feel like they have some level of artistic quality to them. They are interesting and original and evoke a bit of emotional reaction that isn’t just straight adrenaline. Star Sky, a recent indie title out of Sweeden is that sort of title. It’s seems odd to call this a game considering it’s general lack of game like qualities. There’s no score, there’s no competitiveness, there’s no killing of anything (as far as I can tell). It’s mostly just a quiet simple narrative told through the basic imagery on screen.

The execution really does make the experience here though. The basic silhouette graphic style adds a lot of mystery. It’s all very crisp and well designed too which makes it clear what you’re looking at despite any real depth. The sound definitely helps with the atmosphere presented here as well. There’s a lot of natural outdoorsy sounds, crickets chirping, occasionally there’s rain fall. The key is that there are slight cues, mostly in the form of a light flourish of music to indicate that “this is an area where something could happen”.

These events however are dependent on what you’ve done previously, for example, you won’t gain your companion follower if you didn’t previously gather the rose. But then you may not WANT to pick her up. There are about 20 different scenarios to come across and unlock and it’ll take multiple plays to get through it. This isn’t quite as tricky as it seems though considering that a single play through lasts maybe 5-10 minutes.

Overall though, it IS short and it IS fairly basic in game play. The experience is well executed and it’s certainly a good example of “Video Games as Art”. It also helps that it’s a $2.99 game, so it falls very much in the realm of impulse buy, especially if it looks at all interesting.

Review – BIT.TRIP BEAT (PC)

Apr 23rd, 2011

by Ramen Junkie.

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Gaijin Games | Nov 2nd, 2010

What do you get when you take the simplicity of Pong, a game that involves hitting small square “balls” with a rectangular paddle, and add in some musical aspects, a bit of plot, and ramp up the play mechanics beyond a 2 player game of tennis? Whatever it would be, it’s probably pretty close to BIT.TRIP BEAT. Ok, really the only thing they really share in common is hitting balls with paddles and retro styling. The general premise here is that you must deflect a series of rhythmic balls back with your paddle. They are more or less in time with the beat making this a bit of a Rhythm game, though not really in the traditional, Dance Dance Revolution/Guitar Hero sense. It’s not as straight forward as it seems either. You’ll start out with straight flying balls in a regular fashion but the game quickly becomes more complex with balls that stop or fly in series and move at angles striking just off from one another. It can get pretty complex at times.

As you deflect more you build up a larger multiplier for your score. You also change from various modes depending on how well you’re doing, which actually ramps up the difficulty some. If you continue to do well, you’ll go from all of the balls producing melodic notes and producing flashing sparks down to a very bleak near death black screen with white dots, no background music and only simple beeping to signify that you’ve hit anything. Miss too much in this basic distraction free mode, and it’s Game Over. It’s generally a fun game, you’ve gotta be quick and the chip tune style music is well mixed. It’s a bit short unfortunately. There’s only a few stages and songs to play though each song is pretty long and consists of several “stages” in itself. The recent Valve Potato Themed ARG added a nice Glados themed tune in addition to the original songs.

There’s even some bosses. These bosses are large blocks of balls which come out and shoot parts of themselves at you. There’s a bit of a benefit here because the ball color tends to correspond to how it acts and knowing what a boss is made from can help anticipate how to react. For example, the boss pictured here has simple yellow straight shooting balls but it also has a lot of the orange “bounce” balls which require being juggled for 3 or 4 hops before they leave the area. The simple graphics are charmingly well done as well, though when things start to explode or the background gets a little bright it can make the game difficult to keep track of. This is part of the game’s difficulty though there are times when it feels like kind of a cheap shot at artificially increasing the difficulty. So in summary, BIT.TRIP BEAT is a decent musical retro styled game that should appeal to fans of twitch style rhythm based gameplay. It could stand to be a bit longer but it’s a pretty solid and well made game otherwise.